» Wed Sep 01, 2010 6:19 pm
Oh geez.
I thought geeks hung out around CRPGs....
Hokay. first off, since we know that the game has to maintain consistency across multiple platforms, that means you can scratch some things off the video card right now. No shader model 4. No DX-11 functionality. Aside from the frame buffer, the rest of the card will be for processing textures and shaders. 500 megs -should- be sufficient. No idea if the PC version is HD, so an hdmi port isn't likely to be needed, unless you run your monitor with it by preference. Anything above 30fps is imperceptible to the average human eye; pad that by again as much, so that you don't stutter if you somehow overload the PCI-E bus. One card is all you need; dual carding so you can claim 150+ fps is nothing more than bragging. Personally, I've never run across a game that demanded dual cards.....at least since the original Monster cards and the beginning of the shooter craze. OpenGL will be a non issue if this is a gaming rig (unless you intend to run classic games that need it). Any card that fits within those general parameters will be good enough. Basically, the choices will be shaped by how many monitors you have, cooling requirements, power supply (remember you have to power video cards separately if you have lots of on-card RAM), and what other games you may play.
Processor is a matter of how capable the software is. Very few games actually take advantage of multiple core CPU's. And those that do certainly do =not= have 8 threads to take the full attention of something like a i7; that would be nothing more than stiffy point bragging. Same with the Phenom II X6. A graphics app like Max or Messiah or Premiere or After Effects could use that many threads; games simply don't. One of the quad core chips would do the job more than adequately. Which chip is flame war material. Skyrim may prove to be one of the users, though, as we know they have Havok Physics and Behavior, and both are multi-threaded.
Motherboard is far more critical than most give it credit for being. No onboard video, as that bites into your system RAM. With AMD boards, the kind of memory you can use depends on the actual processor, as the memory controller has been on the CPU dye since the Athlon 64 first came out. Intel is finally catching up on that score, but you need to be careful there. If you get an older Intel setup on a deal, you could wind up with the memory controller on the north bridge....and have to deal with the bottleneck of lack of bandwidth there. Cheap mobo's have cheap components, and games are the most stressful usage there is next to CG work. So a little extra spent there will keep the system going a lot longer. If you have a 64 bit system, then consider getting 8 gigs of RAM. That should be more than enough for the system. If stuck with a 32 bit system, you're stuck with 2 gigs max for any one program to address. Setting the large mem flag in XP will let you use 3 gigs (still 2 for apps, but the OS is offloaded onto the 1st gig, leaving the remaining 2 gigs to be treated as regular ram).
HDD. Here is the last remaining bottleneck in the entire system. Physical hard drives have seach time in the milliseconds; one reason to load your system with as much memory as it can use; loading it into system ram saves a lot of time. The new SSD's are much faster; the larger ones are internally configured in a RAID 0 array, to avoid latency issues. But SSD is still a fairly new technology, and the actual drives have yet to prove their longevity through even the 1st generation. If you have the funds to use them, great......but you might find them dying faster than a mechanical drive. Or not. No one knows at this time. If you can't afford SSD, a quick way to break the bottle is to use a RAID 0 array as your boot drive. The down side is that you have exactly =NO= fault tolerance. If one drive fails, the array is dead. You will have to replace the bad drive and reload everything. The upside is that by using data striping (which is what RAID 0 is; data is 'striped' across both drives) you effectively double your read/write bandwidth. On tests I've had a renderbox computer with RAID 0 go from power on to desktop (xp-64) in around 15 seconds. This only takes two drives, and you can get 500gb SATA II drives for as little as $39us each.....which is $80 for a terabyte RAID array. All the semi-decent motherboards support RAID, so no extra hardware is needed.
Power supply. Here is something you might want to spend a little extra on. Not so much for neccessity as for safety. If your system draws, say, 320 watts average, then with an 800 watt supply you have a 480watt surge buffer before you even max out the supply rating. You -can- get one that is close to your power usage if you need to save the money, but the PS will run much hotter, and you will have a far narrower margin of safety. A ballsy video card can come out of a dormant state and demand a lot to get back to operating status. The same if you have multiple hard drives that spin down when they are not being used actively.
And lastly, heat dissipation. You have to make sure you have a good cooling solution in place, be it cross blowing fans to liquid nitrogen. Heat is deadly for computer systems, pc board adhesive, and a lot of other things in there.
Stay inside those general boundaries, and you won't waste money on things you simply do not need.
